How to Train a Kid & Thoughts After Career Day

This is a Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter. I remember using one of these when I was growing up. Clack, clack, clack. Ding.

This is a Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter. I remember using one of these when I was growing up. Clack, clack, clack. Ding.

Less than half of the 48 elementary school kids who sat in on my “writer/blogger” Career Day session recognized the photo of a manual typewriter, the writing tool I used in 1988 for “Basic Writing” – Medill School of Journalism’s freshman weed-out course for journalism majors.

A few of them had Instagram accounts. Many of them knew they were too young to be on Facebook, but a few of them had been promised an account for future birthdays. They all recognized my iPad and talked about typing on laptops.

Yet all of them were still thinking of writers in the more traditional sense – authors of books or writers of magazine or newspaper articles. Very few of them were thinking about writers in terms of web content, scripts for TV & movies, song lyrics, etc. The idea of writing a book or writing for a newspaper, both of which I have done, did not easily translate into the 21st century despite having been born into a fast-moving tech world.

My father had me keep a journal when I was young. I read the first entry from my yellow notebook to each Career Day group – Oct 13, 1978. It was journaling in the pre-blog decades – pencil and paper. Almost 30 years later, I’m still journaling – on paper and onto the internet.

I’m a parent now, and I am wondering what habits, skills, and values I am instilling and emphasizing in our day-to-day chaos that will serve my children well in the decades to come. It’s not just about jobs but about passions and the sweet spot when passions and vocation collide. My parents are immigrants, and I am the product of that pragmatism. Anderson Cooper could chase after his bliss. My job was to succeed. My parents didn’t leave a developing country on the verge of martial law so that I could follow my bliss. Bliss was a vocabulary word. My future depended on education and a job. The goal was to develop skills whether or not they were my gifts.

But life as the adult child of immigrants in this century continues to be that of navigating shifting sand. The kids at Career Day will most likely never know what a pension is, and who knows what will happen to Social Security. Kids today have parents who in earlier years may have expected companies and employees to live out loyalty in terms of job security instead of a punch card or plastic key fob for points. The job market, and the idea of a career continues to develop and change. It used to be who you knew. Now we add a touch of LinkedIn and Career.com. I thought I was ready, but I’m barely ready myself. I feel behind, and if I’m behind where are my kids?

So it got me thinking about Career Day and how the format has remained the same, but the careers and the idea of presenting options may have to change with the times as well as how we have conversations at dinner about school, grades, favorite subjects and “what do you want to do when you grow up?”.

That last question is a tough one because sometimes I feel like I’m still figuring that one out.

 

 

Career Day: What do you do? Who are you? And other questions of identity

Today I am presenting at my youngest child’s elementary school for career day.

My husband has been presenting at Career Days since our oldest child hit kindergarten. He is a dentist. His career, what he does, and how he might identify himself lends itself to career day. Pictures of nasty teeth made pretty. Impressions of teeth. Scrubs. Loupes (those cool and yet goofy looking magnifying glasses). Non-latex gloves. Dental lasers. Who doesn’t think using a laser would be a cool career?!

But I am not a dentist. I am….

A mother of three. A wife. A daughter. A sister. A sister-in-law. An aunt. A friend. A neighbor.

A part-time cosmetics salesperson.

A full-time multicultural trainer and diversity officer for a religious non-profit organization.

A volunteer. 

Year after year I would watch Peter fill out the Career Day volunteer application, and I would wonder what I would do as a presenter. Is a career something you get paid to do? Is it something you have achieved a level of expertise? Is it a job? Is it a passion?

Well, I finally decided I am a writer. I have had and continue to work in a variety of jobs, but at the heart of it all, I continue to write. Sometimes I get paid. Sometimes I don’t get paid, but what I write leads to an opportunity to speak in front of groups of people, for which I get paid.

I blog. I edit and write comments. I read other authors’ books, and I write reviews. I tweet. I journal.

I am a writer. 

What are you?

Did You Grow Up to Be What You Wanted to Be?

When I grow up I want to be a….

What did you want to be?

When I was much younger I wanted to be a teacher. And then I wanted to be a journalist. And then I wanted to be a section editor of a major metropolitan newspaper and win the Pulitzer Prize.

Somewhere along the way I figured out that I’m still growing up, even as a 40-something mother of three, wife of one, and there are many things I want to be when I grow up.

In the meantime, I am, among many other things:

  • a culture, management & leadership consultant and trainer
  • a public speaker
  • a writer, blogger, author

Friday I will be spending the day at Corban’s middle school for career day as a presenter. I don’t remember attending a Career Day at school as a child, but I do remember how I felt when Ms. Johnson, my high school English teacher, encouraged me to rework some of my poetry because she saw “potential”. I remember Mrs. Umlauf encouraging me to spend a week of my summer at journalism camp and learn the art of sports writing because she believed in me. I remember Mr. Studt asking me why I was wasting time on the poms squad when I could try out for the speech team. (I did both, so there.)

I also had parents who believed in me. They sat me down and told me that I shouldn’t pick one school over another just because of the financial aid package. They wanted to me chase the dream (Little did I know they also had a another dream of me writing for awhile, getting that out of my system and then going to law school. It was like a Korean drama/Inception kind of dream.)

I stopped and took a detour between “journalist” and “section editor”.

So help a presenter out:

What did you think you wanted to be/do when you grew up? And are you doing it? Why or why not? If you are, is it what you thought it would be? If you aren’t, what are you doing and how the heck did you get there?

And for those of us still growing up: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Business cards, name tags & other ways to label one another

Next week at my son’s middle school I am going to be a writer.

It’s career day, and for years I’ve signed up my husband, a dentist, for career day presentation duties. I help out lost children in the halls.

But this year I’m trying on the “writer” label out for size. It’s not completely new. I fell in love with writing after getting my first attempt at a high school sports story returned to me decorated with red marker. My favorite color is red, and I must confess there is a competitive streak in me. I am my own biggest competition.

For years I was a bonafide newspaper reporter. My business card proved it. The bylines are saved on yellowing newsprint. A few digital copies still remain out in the inter webs. I was a newspaper reporter.

And then there was this “writing project” that I had the honor of participating in. At one point I had to come to grips with the fact that even if our ideas could become a manuscript it had “a snowball’s chance in hell” of making it to print. And then hell froze over, and someone started calling me and four other amazing women “authors”.

Even then it felt a little phony to call myself a “writer”, but it was the start of a journey back and forward to discover, identify, clarify, and claim that elusive thing many of us refer to as our “voice”. It’s the way we sound when we speak, write, laugh, argue, persuade, listen, dance and simply “are” – and it’s all the same. It’s a hint of the woman I know deep down inside God has created me and “my inmost being” and for those of you who know what I’m talking about know that it is simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. It can point you to God’s faithfulness and goodness just as your false-self with all our insecurities and just plain ickiness.

It’s figuring out the gifts, talents, strengths and weaknesses that you have to share, do and express because that is what God meant for you to share, do and express. And then you have to own that.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to “own” it, as silly as it seems since I am writing all of this down.

As a woman, wife, mother, writer/blogger, speaker, aspiring crafter, amateur baker/gardener, laundress, chauffeur, seamstress, cleaning lady, personal shopper, diversity officer at a non-profit, middle manager and an evangelical Christian, I have several ways of answering the question, “What do you do?”

How do you answer the question?